Together or Separate: How to Live as a Couple during Couples Counselling
All relationships have ups and downs. Often, the downs are easy to manage through mutual understanding, compromise, or sacrifice. However, there are also times when they can be difficult to overcome.
This can lead to animosity and even resentment. Living separately in such scenarios can be helpful, particularly in conjunction with couples counselling. Yes, living separately doesn’t always have to come with the implications of a divorce.
Choosing to live apart while seeing a psychologist in India can make it easier to cope with relationship problems. However, not all are on board with the idea.
If you’re somebody on the fence about the idea of separation and therapy together, here’s an in-depth guide to help you out.
Benefits of Engaging in Couples Counselling While Being Separated
There are many circumstances where separation accompanied by couples counselling can prove to be helpful. Here are some of them:
1. Space for Emotional Processing
In many scenarios, proximity can be a detriment to mutual understanding. You simply might not find space to process your emotions. Staying apart can help both feel at equilibrium and have the freedom to understand their and their partner’s emotions.
This especially helps when feelings of sadness, hurt, and anger are involved. It also helps you better understand what you learn at therapy and gives you space to implement the interventions or techniques.
Top psychologists in India recommend separation to couples to get some emotional respite. However, the course of action for you might defer depending on the nature and severity of your problems.
2. Reduce Conflict
If your relationship issues have evolved into a problem that causes frequent fights and altercations, living together can only aggravate the symptoms. Separation can give couples the time and headspace required to understand their partner’s emotions, triggers, and decisions.
Also Read: Marriage and Couples Counselling – What it is, Benefits and Common Myths
3. Space to Reflect
Living separately gives you and your partner time to digest their needs and also reflect on the direction their relationship is going. It gives time, space, and headroom to attain clarity and set goals during couples counselling based on their understanding. Moreover, this newfound clarity can also become a foundation upon which couples build their relationship anew.
4. Individual Growth
Living together in tough relationship phases can make you spend more mental fuel towards solving issues, overthinking, and fighting. This leaves no space for you to grow personally or professionally, which is, in turn, necessary for partners to grow together as a couple.
In fact, individual growth, be it emotional, mental, physical, or a combination of the three, can sometimes solve the difficulties that you might have been facing. Again, to reiterate the point, living separately can give you the space you need to advance in things that matter the most.
When Is Living Together More Practical?
As a couple, there are many situations where your partner’s presence is necessary for the therapeutic process to really work, especially when communication and interaction are involved. When living separately, couples miss out on the opportunities to talk, making couples counselling, to some degree, ineffective, as therapists won’t have the measure of progress.
It can also put proximity bias into play. Essentially, it means out of sight, out of mind. So, couples that are struggling with bridging emotional distance may find separation to make things worse.
Lastly, living apart can lead to challenges like schedules and managing shared responsibilities, especially if a child is involved. This will take the attention away from the counselling process and, thereby, make it that much harder to have a positive effect.
Over to You
Separating, couples counselling, and managing relationship issues are all emotionally intensive things that you need time to decide on.
In some cases, separation can bring respite, while in others, it can aggravate existing issues while giving birth to new ones.
It’s best to discuss the possibilities with your partner before jumping into any decision. Or better yet, discuss it with your therapist to come up with a foolproof solution.
We at Faculty Minds can help. As one of the best marriage counsellors in Mumbai, our experts are equipped with the emotional and mental tools to help you manage your relationship problems better and come out of them stronger and more accepting than before.
Connect with us today and learn about all we can do for you!
